Blog Post:Campaign tracking is one of the most fundamental strategies to increase conversion for your company. Campaign tracking is a huge topic that was covered in the past in this blog post and I will revisit it here with some information for the more advanced users out there.

Campaign basics

If you are experienced with campaigns you can skip to the campaigns advanced post. However, if you would like a refresher or are new to web analytics this will help you get a good grasp on what campaign tracking is all about.
Definition of a campaign: A campaign (aka marketing campaign) is any situation where you make an effort to acquire traffic or drive traffic to your website or another location.
Examples of campaigns:

Google Paid advertising

Banner advertising

TV Commercials

Facebook Fan Page

Twitter Tweets

Youtube Channel

Email campaign

Tracking a Campaign: Tracking a campaign is a way to measure the success of a campaign. For example, if you are paying for Google advertising you will want to know if you are getting a good return on your investment in the Google advertisment.
To do this in SiteCatalyst you create a unique "tracking code" to the URL for a campaign. Then you add a plug-in on your site that captures the tracking code for reporting. For example, if you run a Google campaign that lands the user on a product page, the URL for the campaign will include a unique tracking code that looks something like this.

http://www.example.com/products/nintendo_wii.html?cid=g:p:3121

After these tracking codes are pushed into SiteCatalyst they will generate a report like the one below.

The above report shows you a ton of information about specific campaigns. You can see how much revenue each campaign is generating for your company and many other metrics that are setup in your reporting. The above report is not comprehensive when you first look at it. Which is why SiteCatalyst comes with a classification tool called SAINT. SAINT allows you to take campaign code "g:p:3121" and tell SiteCatalyst the code is from Google Paid and is for your Nintendo Wii product. Learn more about classifications here. After you setup classifications you get more reports that are a little more comprehensive to look at.

Important things to know about Campaigns ( Info from here)
1. The campaigns variable (tracking code) comes with full subrelations by default so you can breakdown every Conversion Variable by any tracking code and any Classification of any tracking code.
2. If you do a lot of Paid Search, creating thousands of unique tracking codes and inputting them into the various search engines can be tedious and costly. Omniture's SearchCenter product automates this process and provides many other incredible benefits so check it out.
3. The "Click-throughs" metric is only available in Campaign reports, though there are more advanced ways to implement this if more flexibility is needed.
Campaign Tracking Enhancements
As you are aware visitors to your site do not only originate from your paid or managed campaigns. Visitors might come directly to your site by typing the URL, they might find your site through a natural search results ( as opposed to paid search) . Visitors might also come from a referring site that simply links to one of your pages. To take advantage of these types of traffic sources SiteCatalyst has two solutions that will give you better insight as to where your traffic is coming from.

Each of these solutions allows you to look at all your traffic sources (where your traffic originates from) in a single report. This single report helps you to measure the effectiveness of all your campaigns and other traffic sources side by side to help you make the most informed decisions possible.
Campaigns AdvancedPart 2 of "Campaign Tracking Revisited" discusses advanced solutions and strategies for tracking campaigns. Part 2 is live so enoy.
Other posts you might be interested in:

Campaign Tracking Revisited – Part 1 (Overview) [Advanced Solutions]

Campaign tracking is one of the most fundamental strategies to increase conversion for your company. Campaign tracking is a huge topic that was covered in the past in this blog post and I will revisit it here with some information for the more advanced users out there.

Campaign basics

If you are experienced with campaigns you can skip to the campaigns advanced post. However, if you would like a refresher or are new to web analytics this will help you get a good grasp on what campaign tracking is all about.

Definition of a campaign: A campaign (aka marketing campaign) is any situation where you make an effort to acquire traffic or drive traffic to your website or another location.

Examples of campaigns:

Google Paid advertising

Banner advertising

TV Commercials

Facebook Fan Page

Twitter Tweets

Youtube Channel

Email campaign

Tracking a Campaign: Tracking a campaign is a way to measure the success of a campaign. For example, if you are paying for Google advertising you will want to know if you are getting a good return on your investment in the Google advertisment.

To do this in SiteCatalyst you create a unique “tracking code” to the URL for a campaign. Then you add a plug-in on your site that captures the tracking code for reporting. For example, if you run a Google campaign that lands the user on a product page, the URL for the campaign will include a unique tracking code that looks something like this.

http://www.example.com/products/nintendo_wii.html?cid=g:p:3121

After these tracking codes are pushed into SiteCatalyst they will generate a report like the one below.

The above report shows you a ton of information about specific campaigns. You can see how much revenue each campaign is generating for your company and many other metrics that are setup in your reporting. The above report is not comprehensive when you first look at it. Which is why SiteCatalyst comes with a classification tool called SAINT. SAINT allows you to take campaign code “g:p:3121” and tell SiteCatalyst the code is from Google Paid and is for your Nintendo Wii product. Learn more about classifications here. After you setup classifications you get more reports that are a little more comprehensive to look at.

1. The campaigns variable (tracking code) comes with full subrelations by default so you can breakdown every Conversion Variable by any tracking code and any Classification of any tracking code.

2. If you do a lot of Paid Search, creating thousands of unique tracking codes and inputting them into the various search engines can be tedious and costly. Omniture’s SearchCenter product automates this process and provides many other incredible benefits so check it out.

3. The “Click-throughs” metric is only available in Campaign reports, though there are more advanced ways to implement this if more flexibility is needed.

Campaign Tracking Enhancements

As you are aware visitors to your site do not only originate from your paid or managed campaigns. Visitors might come directly to your site by typing the URL, they might find your site through a natural search results ( as opposed to paid search) . Visitors might also come from a referring site that simply links to one of your pages. To take advantage of these types of traffic sources SiteCatalyst has two solutions that will give you better insight as to where your traffic is coming from.

Each of these solutions allows you to look at all your traffic sources (where your traffic originates from) in a single report. This single report helps you to measure the effectiveness of all your campaigns and other traffic sources side by side to help you make the most informed decisions possible.

Campaigns Advanced

Part 2 of “Campaign Tracking Revisited” discusses advanced solutions and strategies for tracking campaigns. Part 2 is live so enoy.